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Vicar blasts ‘cringeworthy’ beatbox machines

30 January 2013

Dr Giles FraserBBC

Dr Giles Fraser, former canon of St Paul’s Cathedral, and
now vicar of St Mary's, Newington,
has condemned karaoke-style recorded music devices in churches as ‘cringeworthy
beatbox machines with no gravitas.’

Interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, along
with Westminster Abbey sub-organist Robert Quinney, Dr Fraser said, ‘In the
liturgy, a musician sitting at an organ needs to react sensitively to what's
going on; a machine can’t do that and you can hear how inappropriate a
machine's intervention is when it gets it wrong.’

Asked by presenter Jim Naughtie how else churches might
replace superannuated organists with no obvious successors to hand, Dr Fraser
responded that as Christianity predated the invenation of the organ there were
and still are other ways of making music in church – plainsong and taizé
chanting, for example – without resorting to machines. ‘If you wouldn’t have it
at your funeral, you shouldn’t have it in church on a Sunday morning.’

Robert Quinney added, ‘Anything that sounds so transparently
fake needs to be treated with suspicion. It’s not necessarily a natural step
for a pianist to become the sort of organist who could play in a local church, but
local congregations have changed, and there is still a stock of young organists
coming through.’

‘Live’ organists are familiar enough with the perils of lack
of co-ordination with congregations – getting ‘out’. ‘A human being playing the
organ can hear what other people are doing, so accompanying a congregation
enables you to be sensitive to the speed etc,’ said Quinney.

Dr Fraser concluded that, having witnessed one organist
eating sandwiches during his sermon and another slyly improvising a
processional on the theme tune of Blackadder for a visit by a former
Bishop of Bath and Wells, he would miss their ‘fantastic’ sense of humour if
replaced by machines, and stressed the importance of organists’ contribution
to the liturgy.